Another week, and another mission to my amazing neighbourhood U.K. import shop, British Pantry. So many boxes brimming with temptations, both sweet and savoury, yet so little time/treasure. This trip, I brought back a small bag of Cadbury BiscBits, a treat I’d never met before, that featured the tantalizing “NEW” in a banner on the […]

I first spotted these new Dutch Gourmet potato chips at Safeway a few months ago, but managed to summon the willpower to keep myself from buying them. After all, did I really need another potato chip to be hooked on? I eventually caved, mostly because I love Old Dutch chips (it’s a childhood thing), but […]

During the winter months, I gravitate toward big, heavy, complicated beers, with lots of roasty, toasty, malty flavour. It’s the liquid equivalent of curling up under a nice, comfortable blanket with a good book while a roaring fire blazes on your TV. But in the summer? Sometimes I just want something simple, delicious and yummy, […]

My first experience with guava juice was in Hawaii as a teen. While it didn’t do much for me at the time, I’ve come around to the taste. These days, I love it. One sip of guava juice takes me back to a Honolulu lanai, reading the Sunday New York Times between sips of the […]

Maybe I’m just an oblivious schlub from the colonies, but I’d never heard of Battenberg cake until my boss mentioned it during a conversation about the wonderful things to be found at UK import shops. The way it was described, it sounded like a wonderful blend of flavours: sponge cake plus marzipan plus apricot jam. […]

Why am I drawn to Ikea’s Swedish Food Store? Hard to say. Maybe because the prices are generally crazy cheap. Maybe because they have so many curious products that seem vaguely familiar, yet different. And maybe it’s because, unlike trips to some other oddball/curious food shops in town, there’s usually at least a bit of […]

I feel silly saying this, but the I think the first time I tried real, honest-to-goodness Turkish delight (a.k.a. lokum) was around five years ago, at Edmonton’s Heritage Festival. I bought a small baggie full of jellied Turkish delight cubes at a pavilion that, I think, belonged to one of the “-stans.” I had no […]

How’s this for an interesting chocolate bar flavour: blood orange and mango filling. In recent years, mango has become a trendy taste to add to all sorts of things, and the fruit itself is getting easier and easier to find in North American grocery stores of even moderate size. Blood orange, however, is still a […]

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